Power BI Image URLs from Tenant-Secured SharePoint – Intermittent Rendering Issues
Hi everyone, I’m experiencing ongoing issues with displaying image URLs in Power BI reports and apps, and I’m struggling to identify a reliable solution. Context We store employee/user headshots as image URLs in a user lookup table within the models. These images are used across multiple reports for UI elements such as: Logged-in user icons Employee of the Month visuals Leaderboards and other internal dashboards The images are hosted in a company SharePoint folder maintained by our Marketing team. All employees have view permissions to this SharePoint location (not anonymous access). Issue 1 – Power BI Service / Teams When opening reports in Power BI Service or via Teams, some images load correctly while others appear as broken image links. If I manually open the SharePoint image folder in my browser (authenticating via our tenant) and then refresh the report, the images display correctly. However, this only persists temporarily, typically by the next day the images are broken again. This makes me suspect an authentication, cookie, or caching issue rather than an issue with the URLs themselves. Issue 2 – Digital Signage We also surface these reports via a digital signage solution on screens around multiple offices. In this scenario, none of the SharePoint-hosted images render, they consistently show as broken links. Interestingly, the images display correctly in the digital signage platform’s preview, but fail once pushed to the physical screens. My assumption here is that the signage devices do not have the required authentication context (cookies / tokens) to access tenant-secured SharePoint images. Question Has anyone encountered similar behaviour when using SharePoint-hosted image URLs in Power BI? Is there a known or recommended approach for handling image authentication/caching issues like this? Are there better-practice alternatives for hosting images used in Power BI (especially for digital signage scenarios)? Would a different hosting method (e.g. public blob storage, CDN, base64 encoding, etc.) be more appropriate? Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, as I’ve struggled to find clear documentation or examples covering this use case. Thanks in advance.
On-premise PBI Report Server : Paginated Reports dynamic Images
Hi, My question: Does anyone know if it is possible to have a central store of images on the PBI Report Server which can be dynamically referenced within a paginated report image using an external image source url? I've just started report migration of SSRS 2008 R2 reports on to our on-premise Power Bi Report Server. The SSRS 2008r2 reports on the old on prem server run in intergrated mode with a sharepoint site. Images are stored on the sharepoint site and referanced in the SSRS reports as an external image using a URL stored in a sql table. This allows us to have a central store of images which could be updated in a single location and would feed into all of the reports on the report server. When i have tried to replicate this on the PBI Report Server I can’t get the images to render. If I select an image source of external and supply a direct url path for an image stored on the PBI Report Server the image is blank when the report renders. The only way I have been successful in using dynamic images is by creating a binary value in a SQL database, converting to base64, which can then be reference in the image as a database value. Currently on PBIRS Version 15.0.1105.195 which i know is a few releases behind. I have downloaded 15.0.1107.165 to update to. I've been through various forums and not had any luck at finding a solution. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Regards Gareth
